“What a waste,” he told me that night. “If I’d wanted to see the ocean, I could have just walked to Coney Island. I had no idea it was so close.”
His intention had always been to return to school after the war, finish that degree, and get a good job. But then came the attack on his ship, and he had very nearly been burned alive. And the physical pain was the least of it, to hear him tell it. While recovering in Pearl Harbor at the Navy hospital with third-degree burns over half his body, he had been served with a court-martial order. Captain Gehres, the captain of the USS Franklin, had court-martialed every single man who’d ended up in the water on the day of the attack. The captain claimed that those men had deserted, against direct orders. Those men—many of whom, like Frank, had been blown off the ship in flames—were accused of being cowards.
This was the worst of it for Frank. The branding of “coward” burned him more deeply than the branding of fire. And even though the Navy eventually dropped the case, recognizing it for what it was (an attempt by an incompetent captain to shift attention from his many errors that fateful day, by blaming innocent men), the psychological damage had been done. Frank knew that many of the men who had stayed aboard the ship during the attack still considered the men in the water to have been deserters. The other survivors were given medals of valor. The dead were called heroes. But not the guys in the water—not the guys who had gone overboard in flames. They were the cowards. The shame had never left him.
He came home to Brooklyn after the war. But because of his injuries and his trauma (they called it a “neuro-psychopathic condition” back then, and had no treatment for it), he was never the same. There was no way he could go back to college now. He couldn’t sit in a classroom anymore. He tried to finish his degree, but he constantly had to leave the building, run outside, and hyperventilate. (“I can’t be in rooms with people,” as he put it.) And even if he had been able to complete his degree, what kind of job could he have gotten? The man couldn’t sit in an office. He couldn’t sit through a meeting. He could barely sit through a telephone call without feeling like his chest was going to implode from agitation and dread.
How could I—in my easy, comfortable life—understand pain like that?
I couldn’t.
But I could listen.
—
I’m telling you all this now, Angela, because I promised myself I would tell you everything. But I’m also telling you all this because I’m fairly certain that Frank never told you any of it.
Your father was proud of you and he loved you. But he did not want you to know the details of his life. He was ashamed that he had never made good on his early academic promise. He was embarrassed to be working in a job that was so far below his intellectual capacities. He was sick in the heart about the fact that he had never finished his education. And he felt constantly humiliated by his psychological condition. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t sit still, or sleep through the night, or be touched, or have a proper career.
He kept all this from you as much as possible because he wanted you to be able to establish your own life—free from his bleak history. He saw you as a fresh and unsullied creation. He thought it was best if he stayed somewhat distant from you so that you would not be infected by his shadows. That’s what he told me, in any case, and I don’t have any reason not to believe it. He didn’t want you to know him very well, Angela, because he didn’t want his life to hurt your life.
I’ve often wondered what it felt like for you, to have a father who cared so much about you, but who deliberately removed himself from your day-to-day existence. When I asked him if perhaps you longed for more attention from him, he said that you probably did. But he didn’t want to come close enough to damage you. He thought of himself as a person who damaged things.
That’s what he told me, anyway.
He thought it was better just to leave you in the care of your mother.
—
I haven’t mentioned your mother yet, Angela.
I want you to know that this hasn’t been out of disrespect, but quite the opposite. I’m not sure how to talk about your mother or about your parents’ marriage. I will tread carefully here so as to not offend or hurt you. But I will also try to be thorough in my report. At the least, you deserve to know everything I know.
I must start off by saying that I never met your mother—I never even saw a photo of her—and so I know nothing about her, beyond what Frank told me. I tend to believe that his descriptions of her were truthful, only because he was so truthful. But just because he described your mother truthfully doesn’t necessarily mean he described her accurately. I can only assume that she was like all of us—a complicated being, composed of more than one man’s impressions.
You may have known a completely different woman than the person whom your father described to me, is what I’m saying. I’m sorry if my story, then, clashes with what you perceived.
But I will convey it to you, nonetheless.
—
I learned from Frank that his wife’s name was Rosella, that she was from the neighborhood, and that her parents (also Sicilian immigrants) owned the grocery store down the street from where Frank grew up. As such, Rosella’s family was of higher social stature than Frank’s family, who were mere manual laborers.
I know that Frank started working for Rosella’s parents when he was in eighth grade, as a delivery boy. He always liked your grandparents, and admired them. They were more gentle and refined people than his own family. And that’s where he met your mother—at the grocery store. She was three years younger. A hard worker. A serious girl. They got married when he was twenty and she was seventeen.
When I asked if he and Rosella had been in love at the time of their marriage, he said, “Everyone in my neighborhood was born on the same block, raised on the same block, and married someone from the same block. It’s just what you did. She was a good person, and I liked her family.”
“But did you love her?” I repeated.
“She was the right sort of person to marry. I trusted her. She knew I would be a good provider. We didn’t go in for luxuries like love.”
They were married right after Pearl Harbor, like so many other couples, and for the same reasons as everyone else.
And of course you, Angela, were born in 1942.
I know that Frank was unable to get much leave during the last few years of the war, so he didn’t see you and Rosella for quite a long time. (It wasn’t easy for the Navy to ship people home from the South Pacific all the way to Brooklyn; a lot of those guys didn’t see their families for years.) Frank spent three Christmases in a row on an aircraft carrier. He wrote letters home but Rosella rarely replied. She had not finished school, and was self-conscious about her handwriting and her spelling. Because Frank’s family was also barely literate, he was one of the sailors on the aircraft carrier who never got mail.
“Was that painful for you?” I asked him. “Never to hear news from home?”
“I didn’t hold it against anyone,” he said. “My people weren’t the kind to write letters. But even though Rosella never wrote to me, I knew she was faithful, and that she was taking good care of Angela. She was never the type to go around with other boys. That was more than a lot of men on the ship could say about their wives.”
Then there was the kamikaze attack, and Frank was burned over 60 percent of his body. (For all his talk of how other guys on his ship had been just as badly injured as him, the truth is that nobody else with burns as severe as Frank’s had ended up surviving. People didn’t survive burns over 60 percent of their bodies back then, Angela—but your father did.) Then there were the long months of torturous recovery at the naval hospital. When Frank finally came home, it was 1946. He was a changed man. A broken man. You were now four years old, and you didn’t know him except from a photo. He told me that when he met you again after all those years, you were so pretty and bright and kind that he could not believe you belonged to him. He could not believe that anything associated with him could be as pure as you. But you were also a little bit afraid of him. Not nearly so afraid, though, as he was of you.